Harlem on His Mind

THE NATIONAL GALLERY SALUTES ROMARE BEARDEN

As if responding to the rhythm of jazz, the vibrant colors of artist Romare Bearden's collages and paintings seem to shuffle, glide, and leap orr tne canvas, HIS love oi jazz ana tne blues inspired some of his best-known works. In the Jazz series, commissioned as illustrations for an unrealized book on jazz inspired by the 1961 movie Paris Blues, the horns scream in the print Brass Section: Jammiri at Minton's. In the 1974 Of the Blues series, which includes At the Savoy, Carolina Shout, and Mecklenburg County, Saturday Night, the musicians and dancers sway and bop to brilliant red, blue, and yellow notes. "Jazz has shown me the ways of achieving artistic structures that are personal to me," Bearden once said. He was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, and raised in Pittsburgh, but it was in Harlem, where he immersed himself in jazz clubs, religious fervor, street life, and literary culture, that he found his artistic voice. After graduating from New York University with a degree in mathematics, Bearden joined the Harlem Artists Guild and later studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he was deeply influenced by Cubism and collages, particularly the work of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. This fall, 15 years after his death, Bearden will be celebrated with a retrospective at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., a companion book, The Art of Romare Bearden, by Ruth E. Fine (Abrams), and his newly discovered children's book, Li'l Dan, the Drummer Boy (Simon & Schuster).

VERONICA BYRD